@ iandoug,
Man, thanks very much for the link to recoll!!
I installed 1.16.2 and it is really unbelievable what it is capable of.
I entered .mp3 and it came up with not only the music I have but even with audacity zipped howto where .mp3 was mentioned.
And it shows an icon for the type of file it is,like a loudspeaker for music.
I also tried .xcf which is the native Gimp format it opens Gimp when you click open.
Makes you wonder why the KDE devs are still mucking around with their crap.
Gerard._________________To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

Because it is a system of good old fashion scripts in plain
text, it was not hard to track down and fix the little
problem I had

(in case anyone is wondering, you need to feed the -o option
to an unzip line if one of recoll's openoffice filter)

recoll is in fact robust, effective and very useful_________________.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

Sorry for digging up this old thread, but I have to add new experiences. Last post was in Jul 2010.

Recently I installed Kontact again. Thought it might have matured. At first it seemed that I could finally return to KDEPIM. But yesterday portage pulled in an update to KDE and ended up with Nepomuk/Akonadiserver running at 100 % CPU. Or in other words: these programs were keeping my CPU hot. Granted, its cold outside in Europe, but having my two cores constantly running at 65+ °C felt wrong.

It felt doubly wrong considering that I don't need such services.

Therefore I returned to Thunderbird and am now cleaning my system. Strange, everytime you think your KDE desktop is running smoothly and you might start working they come around a corner and mess it up.

I did get a test version of KDE libs to compile with out all that NAS (Nepomuk / Akonadi / Srrigi)
stuff put into IFDEFS I lost interest and thought the community was not interested.
Basically it all could be 'use' flagged out.
That would be work to maintain a custom overlay of NAS optional ebuilds.
You can get kmail and everything that depends on KDE that doesn't use that NAS to build, running without crashes might be another storey.
I think Srrigi was the most annoying to get rid of._________________Donate to Gentoo

Setting USE= -semantic-desktop was the best thing I ever did for my KDE install.

It only became an issue when KMail started to rely on akonadi. It was painful, but I let go of the email client I've been using for over a decade: and I am so glad I did. I use mutt now, and though it took a while to setup, it's beautiful (I use it with getmail and procmail.)

There was zero need for KMail to switch to akonadi, and in fact it worked terribly (it's a broken design imo.) As for redland/virtuoso/soprano and God knows what other crap it pulled in.. let's just say my machine runs a lot slicker now. The other thing that has really made it zippier (for some reason: it wasn't my aim) has been to get rid of all the *kit crap.

If KDE ever stops working like this, I will switch, despite it being my consistent choice of desktop for the last 15 years or so. As is, I'm able to use it since it is meant to work on BSD and Solaris etc as well, and I don't see Qt suddenly becoming Linux-specific.

AFAIC Gnome are trying to get ahead in the race by shooting themselves in the foot.

This is horrible news. If it isn't an oversight in the ebuild, I am afraid that this means kde has completely to go from my disks. I had to return to fvwm essentially now, anyway. It is such a pity that software development means nowadays practically only regression or steps into a completely wrong direction: nepomuk, *kit+systemd, gnome3- and nautilus-castration, making parted useless, unnecessary autotool deprecations, ... meanwhile I am less and less convinced that linux is a good system, because most of its positive aspects have step by step been destroyed: Complete control over the system, powerful tools, convenient usage especially for programmers - all is vanishing.

What? I have yet to see any buildsystem at least as flexible and portable as autotools.
Apart from QT, and some particular packages I have not noticed an exodus from autotools land. AFAIK all GNOME is using it.

Quote:

less and less convinced that linux is a good system

Nah, the kernel is in a good shape. It is only that some DE guys like to integrate, and some, like GNOME, are rolling their own system. It is not forced upon everybody.
There is plenty of space for those who are sceptical of the "progress". Gentoo is one such place. systemd is not going to get you here

What? I have yet to see any buildsystem at least as flexible and portable as autotools.

I also thought so, but the new generation of GNU tols is a huge step backwards: New syntax AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS introduced, and immediately obsoleting ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS, i.e. you have to change config.ac's immediately and are not able to write autotols config files which run with old and current versions of autotools unless you are willing to confuse the user with warnings if he has the new version. Deprecated functions which gettext uses since years, without an update of gettext in sight, thus permantly producing warnings (and maybe soon not working at all) ... it really has become a mess.
Worst thing in my opiniion GNU made recently is of course the parted disaster.

Quote:

Quote:

less and less convinced that linux is a good system

Nah, the kernel is in a good shape.

Maybe, but I had some fatal bugs recently (somewhere in this forum you will find my thread about how to avoid that ext4 destroys regularly megabytes of data...), currently I cannot get my dvbt stick to run, although it is reported to work... maybe I had just bad luck, but this also accumulates recently. Moreover, important things like aufs/overlayfs are still not in kernel since years. Nvidia-drivers-173 (needed on one of my systems) does not run with current kernel while nouveau keeps crashing; on another machine, nvidia-drivers-310.19 does not work with pax memory protection (OK, this is not the kernel itself) while nouveau cannot activate dpms. As I mentioned, issues accumulate recently.

Quote:

It is only that some DE guys like to integrate

Not only: A lot of functions are removed from GNOME (side-by-side view of directories, to name one example). Moreover, for a Unix-based system one could hardly have a worse idea than to force every user to download and install the same add-ons from the web, of course without any possibility to even transfer this setting to another system.

Quote:

It is not forced upon everybody. Gentoo is one such place. systemd is not going to get you here

Let us speak again in two or three years. You will see that you prognosis is false unless you remove more and more programs. This is what already happened with KDE: Successively, I had to remove for varying reasons: amarok, kuickview, kdetv, kmail, kaudiocreator, k3b, and now even dolphin; most are without a comparable substitute - my systems just successively lost essential functionality and gained as a substitute nothing which I would consider a value. Currently, I have kde only for kdm, filelight, and okular - who knows for how long these will remain.
There once was a time where there were even working free alternatives to skype before kde decided that this all needs a big integration into a kopete without working VOIP (maybe this is fixed meanwhile after many years, but I doubt, because AFAIK they started this new system instead whose name I forgot, but which does not run without nepomuk).

so when you want to get things done, do you use
your mac or windows machine?_________________.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

Well, I did not say that more and more applications that are a *part of* (or were sucked into it) DE (mainly GNOME, KDE) environment won't become tightly integrated and require
you to download gigabytes worth of dependencies to do even the simplest thing. What you are trying to accomplish, i.e. to have usable, The UNIX way™ etc. in
a hostile environment, that for quite a long time has been doing things in exact opposite of principles you would like to see, is simply going to fail.
I personally have migrated to WM, after being a long time GNOME 2 user. GNOME 3 was obviously the end of the "Old", so why would I fight against the river?
Most everyday apps I use are not part of any DE suite: Keepassx, xchat, exaile, qbittorrent, emacs,
evince, firefox, audacity, gimp, blender are pretty standalone, and thus invulnerable to the poison

No. It enforces the semantic-desktop USE flag on kdelibs (which will add dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies, dev-libs/soprano, nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets. It does not require you to enable "semantic-desktop" globally._________________systemd - The biggest fallacies

No. It enforces the semantic-desktop USE flag on kdelibs (which will add dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies, dev-libs/soprano, nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets. It does not require you to enable "semantic-desktop" globally.

I hope and pray that they will keep it that way. The home-directories of my users reside on a nfs-mount. The NAS-stuff does not work nicely with nfs-mounts. Elsewhere I have read that the KDE-folk is considering nfs-mounted homes obsolete as most people are using mobile devices with amba-shares anyway

No. It enforces the semantic-desktop USE flag on kdelibs (which will add dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies, dev-libs/soprano, nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets. It does not require you to enable "semantic-desktop" globally.

Not much of a difference, imo: I don't want those libraries installed, leave alone running, and went to a fair amount of effort to get rid of them in the first place. Further, requiring it in the file-manager implies a broader system-wide acceptance of those technologies as a base requirement: something I see getting worse over time, not better (after all, akonadi, virtuoso, redland, all the above, and a full-blown mysql server are required to read email..) Guess I'll switch to spacefm or w/e it's called, along with uam or pmount.

The semantic-desktop force should be gone in 4.9.97, it's just broken currently without it._________________backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic

so when you want to get things done, do you use
your mac or windows machine?

Not yet, though it looks more like I will have to, since meanwhile there are several things which I cannot get done with linux anymore: Even a simple task like copying a memory chip of a device of mine of to a larger chip (which meant I had to extend a fat16 filesystem to keep the boatloader) would not have been possible if <parted-3 would already have been removed from the portage tree (which for sure will happen sooner or later). Moreover, to skype I also had to sell my soul, already.

No. It enforces the semantic-desktop USE flag on kdelibs (which will add dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies, dev-libs/soprano, nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets. It does not require you to enable "semantic-desktop" globally.

.....something I see getting worse over time, not better (after all, akonadi, virtuoso, redland, all the above, and a full-blown mysql server are required to read email..).....

When I switched to gentoo (from arch) I enjoyed finding that in gentoo mysql is actually not required for kde --- I run all of kde and kdepim with semantic desktop using sqlite. mysql is not installed on my system. No special tricks were required, just add "sqlite -mysql" to USE in make.conf

KDE can't be beat for organizing my workflow. Activities are very useful and I've talked myself into loving semantic desktop It's been kind to me for several months now (no runaway cpu use, no data loss, no strange problems -- it all just works fine); of course I may yank it out by the roots if it misbehaves ever again...

When I switched to gentoo (from arch) I enjoyed finding that in gentoo mysql is actually not required for kde --- I run all of kde and kdepim with semantic desktop using sqlite. mysql is not installed on my system. No special tricks were required, just add "sqlite -mysql" to USE in make.conf

Trust me, I've been there. I've been using KDE for donkey's years, and I've stuck with it throughout. I'm glad it worked for you, but it didn't for me. I ran around in circles for a while, getting told it was to do with threading, then configuration etc. Then I thought to myself "this is ridiculous. I used to run KDE on a K6-2 450 with 64MB of RAM.." and started to wonder about the "value" that is added by this leap to integration without getting the basics right.

Quote:

KDE can't be beat for organizing my workflow. Activities are very useful and I've talked myself into loving semantic desktop :oops: It's been kind to me for several months now (no runaway cpu use, no data loss, no strange problems -- it all just works fine); of course I may yank it out by the roots if it misbehaves ever again...

Ah, so it has misbehaved before. Personally I just don't see the need to reinvent notmuch badly. It would have been much saner, and more useful, if they had just wrapped a UI around some of the excellent command line tools, which is the tradition that they came from, along with a minimal spec for communication between UI elements (problems that were solved in technical terms decades ago.)

K3b is a good example, and kmail used to be a model of how to do it, with its display of the SMTP(etc) log in the status bar, available at a click: it was discussed in the Art of Unix Programming (or some Eric Raymond book) as an example of a useful UI that keeps Unix transparency.

I don't personally care about getting a systray icon notifying me of new email when my email client isn't running. In workflow terms, it's far too distracting (it's a well-known phenomenon in most offices). Additionally the time I had with no email at home made me appreciate Knuth's stance a whole lot more. It certainly doesn't merit wholesale changes in the lower layers, nor do any of the other "features": if anything it indicates a lack of technical maturity.

Shiny interfaces work much better on top of a rock-solid basis (that's why Apple ended up ditching their operating system kernel for a BSD codebase.) While I've always been used to KDE not being very stable til about x.4 (eg 3.4 started to be okay), the 4.x series has been ridiculous, frankly amateurish in the stuff that's been pushed out and with a worrying lack of thought behind the "strategic direction".

It runs nice and smooth now, though, without semantic-craptop (I could not believe the amount of bloat that got removed for that), no nubkit rubbish also made it slicker for some reason, and mutt rocks (though I wouldn't mind a minimal gui wrapped round it, getmail with procmail, and notmuch :-)

Trust me, I've been there. I've been using KDE for donkey's years, and ..... started to wonder about the "value" that is added by this leap to integration without getting the basics right.

sitquietly wrote:

KDE can't be beat for organizing my workflow. Activities are very useful and I've talked myself into loving semantic desktop It's been kind to me for several months now (no runaway cpu use, no data loss, no strange problems -- it all just works fine); of course I may yank it out by the roots if it misbehaves ever again...

steveL wrote:

Ah, so it has misbehaved before. .....

Oh yes. I gave up on semantic desktop in kde 4.6 and 4.7. I ripped nepomuk stuff out of kde in my archlinux system, and THAT took a lot of work Only in kde 4.8 and especially 4.9 am I timorously commiting to it. To be honest I maintain three alternate root partitions: (1) gentoo unstable ~amd64 with kde/kdepim with semantic desktop, (2) funtoo current ~amd64 configured almost identically with semantic desktop, and (3) a funtoo stripped-down fallback with kde WITHOUT semantic desktop, and WITHOUT consolekit, policykit or udisks. The fittest will survive.

steveL wrote:

Shiny interfaces work much better on top of a rock-solid basis.....

For several years my "rock-solid" desktop of choice has been xmonad with rox filer and my own scripts for maintaing activity-specific panels. My scripts check which desktop environment I'm running and fire up dolphin or rox, kmail or claws-mail, konsole or roxterm, etc, as appropriate. I've started experimenting with e17 as an alternative. Enlightenment looks promising but will require a lot of customization to suit my needs. Apparently kde with semantic desktop is giving me a good experience -- lately I find myself telling slim to start the nepomuked kde and often I work in it for days without cursing once.

I gave up on semantic desktop in kde 4.6 and 4.7. I ripped nepomuk stuff out of kde in my archlinux system, and THAT took a lot of work :lol: Only in kde 4.8 and especially 4.9 am I timorously commiting to it. To be honest I maintain three alternate root partitions: (1) gentoo unstable ~amd64 with kde/kdepim with semantic desktop, (2) funtoo current ~amd64 configured almost identically with semantic desktop, and (3) a funtoo stripped-down fallback with kde WITHOUT semantic desktop, and WITHOUT consolekit, policykit or udisks. The fittest will survive.

Well I wouldn't run an unstable Gentoo install, if I were you. Stable gentoo, with stuff unmasked as and when you need it (update is really nice for that), combined with FEATURES=buildpkg so you can rollback, makes for a lovely machine ime, and it works efficiently once you get rid of akonadi, nepomuk et al.

sitquietly wrote:

For several years my "rock-solid" desktop of choice has been xmonad with rox filer and my own scripts for maintaing activity-specific panels. My scripts check which desktop environment I'm running and fire up dolphin or rox, kmail or claws-mail, konsole or roxterm, etc, as appropriate. I've started experimenting with e17 as an alternative. Enlightenment looks promising but will require a lot of customization to suit my needs. Apparently kde with semantic desktop is giving me a good experience -- lately I find myself telling slim to start the nepomuked kde and often I work in it for days without cursing once.

Yeah xmonad is cool: #gentoo-haskell bods are perhaps the nicest group of gentoo-devs I've come across. You clearly have a lot of time and inclination to tweak configs, and even maintain 3 separate installs. I don't, and I like my desktop to be boringly reliable, until I choose to start playing. And KDE has always made an effort to be a polished setup, with good defaults and configuration options for when you need to change something. This series has been the exact opposite, half-baked and ill-conceived afaic, and the reason is the dumbass Poettering-mentality of changing everything because you can, to suit the use-case you're worried about, and sod everyone else who doesn't quite fit. IOW I'm still not seeing the value added that warrants the wholesale butchery of the processing model.

It would have been so simple, and elegant, just to leave the basics alone and add glitz at a higher layer. Instead the tail wags the dog, and trivial interface improvements are used as justification for major changes at lower-levels, where they have no business, and indeed borked software is the result, til users have spent a few years fixing it. Colossal waste of effort, imo.

I've just found "Attach as tab to.." in KDE-4.9, and it is sweet :-) It makes working with 3 kate sessions (for a big code project) really nice.

It's a great example of what I mean by "leave the basics alone and add glitz at a higher layer". I love that it's all done at the WM level, with no changes in the underlying apps whatsoever. This means it's totally generic and works with every app you can run, and requires no "inturgration" code in any of them. So, if I needed to work on a diagram to do with my code say, or any other app I might need, that's just as easy and still part of the same app-group.

As soon as I mentioned this, a friend (who shall remain nameless) immediately said "Hrm, maybe that would be a motivation for the kate devs to implement multi-session support natively?" which in my mind would be exactly the wrong way to do it. Keeping the separation means kate devs don't need to go there, and can focus on what they're good at. Separate taskbar entries is just what's required, which you wouldn't get with kate handling it all (which would also add a lot of complexity and bloat to kate for no reason.. just like semantic-craptop.) And those can still be merged with an easy selection, if desired. That they happen to be the same app is irrelevant, so long as it's well-behaved.

Multi-processing and demarcation of responsibilities is a good thing: easier to grok for the user as well as the developer and admins, simpler to code and more efficient than inturgrated "solutions".

Note that I'm not saying there is no scope to add awareness of running in a group to a KDE app, enabled by kdelibs across the DE in a future release. That is not the same as making the app do the work itself, which is analogous to a lot of the push for inturgration requiring wholesale changes to the model in lower layers, instead of doing it right and managing complexity at a higher level, building on solid base components. It would be an option for the developers, iff it actually makes sense for the app in question, but in no way needed for this to be useful.

For instance, it might be nice if kate didn't warn about editing a file in another process, iff that process were another kate session running in the same tab-group. But that really is a trivial change in comparison to kate handling the multi-session natively. And it certainly would not merit any major code changes: the user can just turn that feature off on a per-session basis already. But since it's been done the right way, the major functionality is all there, and minor improvements are just that: both minor in scope and real improvements, since now it's a question of "what?" given the major "how?" that is implemented right.

Even if that never gets added, and I'd prefer it not to be if it needs significant code changes to any app, the feature is excellent as-is, and incredibly useful. It doesn't dictate anything to the user, it merely enables a greater deal of control over existing processes. It's a great example of providing mechanism, and not dictating policy.

Frankly it's what they should have been doing from the beginning of the 4.x series, and more importantly how they should have been doing it, instead of all that wasted effort on functionality that doesn't enable anything new for the end-user. I can only hope they're returning to form :-)